So Peter Mui has turned me onto the DIY Robocar race. I will be attending today (Saturday, yeah it is after midnight right now)
Looks like you can still sign up to attend.
Anyways I will be streaming on
meet.jit.si/Pi.BerkeleyLUG probably starting at 2pm when the races start. It will be from my phone so we'll see how that works.
It will be my first time there. Peter had told me about these races before but I kept forgetting, but Friday I met up with him online for a stream on Discord from Circuit Launch.
Maybe I can show a bit of the facility. Looks to be a pretty impressive Maker Space.
Oh yeah, The Robocars are like rc-cars but are not human controlled. They use sensors and/or cameras to navigate the track. Some have onboard processing like a Raspberry Pi and others make use of servers in the cloud (at least that is what I understand from the descriptions I have heard. Later today I will see for myself)
I will update by email to the list if the stream starts before 2pm.
Ok so Sunday will be the Berkeley Pi meeting.
This time I will be going back to the theme format. This month
Cameras or Video.
Use the Pi camera port. Try out the newer HQ camera. Or play around with the ESP-CAM.
For the Pi:
- You will need a Raspberry Pi of course.
- Power supply (USB c for the 4 and micro USB for the earlier ones)
- An sd card (micro for the newer PI)
- A display and hdmi cable (full size for older Pi, micro for the 4 and mini for the zero) Or an hdmi capture device. There are very cheap Hdmi to USB dongles that present to the computer as a webcam. So you could stream that easy on Jitsi.
- Keyboard and/or mouse. You could enable SSH on the Pi but public wifi normally disables that on local network
- The camera. Remember the zero has a smaller connector and so uses a different flex cable.
For the ESP32-Cam:
- Serial cable, usually a USB to serial. The ESP had male header pins so your cable should have female connections
- Extra 5V power. I find the 5V from the USB to serial cable is not enough to boot, though probably enough to upload code. Seems that the wifi requires a little more current. Anyways a second USB cable where you have broken out the 5V and ground will work.
- Some kind of IDE like Arduino and on Linux your user needs to be a member of the group that can do serial. On Debians it is the dialout group, I think. And on Arch it is uucp.
Last Berkeley LUG we talked a bit about using a virtual webcam with v4l2-loopback. Like using ffmpeg to compose a stream to pushout via the virtual cam. Don (? sorry If I remember wrong I am bad with names) thought about using a DSLR as a webcam. So this could be something to try out Sunday.
Meeting Details:
Sunday will be a hybrid meeting. Both online and in person.
Virtual Meeting on Jitsi:
tom is inviting you to a meeting.
Join the meeting:
To join by phone instead, tap this: +1.512.647.1431,,3314091209#
Looking for a different dial-in number?
For the virtual part I will have the CyclopsCam attached to my laptop. So we can have everyone included in the
conversation.
In Person:
Caffe Strada
2300 College Ave, Berkeley, CA 94704
This is an outdoor cafe right across from the Berkeley Campus.
Seating seems OK but table space is very limited. And many outlets though.
I will be bringing the AUDIO DEVICE. It is a video conferencing USB with built in speakerphone. Any other audio at the In-Person meeting will generate feedback.
You can connect to the Jitsi meet on your own computer but I ask that you turn off sound and mic. Headset is OK but I can tell you the latency will feel weird.
See you Sunday,
Thomas